EASTER SUNDAY
DR. JIM DIXON
APRIL 11, 2004
JOHN 20:11-17, LUKE 23:33-46
We welcome you on this beautiful Easter morning. It’s a little more beautiful than we anticipated. We’re glad that you’re here. At the first service we had a crowd. The second service was like all of Fiddler’s Green decided to descend upon us. We had about 6,000 people trying to come to that second service, so we had standing room only in the gym and in the lobbies. You are the people either having a late lunch or you had an early brunch but we are glad that you’re here. I want you to know that I’m wearing exactly the same outfit that I did last Christmas Eve, so if you come twice a year there’s some sense of continuity for you and we’re glad you’re here too.
Our scripture for this morning is taken from two places. First of all, it’s taken from Luke’s Gospel, the 23rd chapter, beginning with the 33rd verse; and then from the Gospel of John beginning with the 20th chapter, the 11th verse.
Most of you have seen Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ starring Jim Caviezel. Of course, the movie has been a surprising box office success and to this date the movie has grossed more than $330 million and it is anticipated that the movie will ultimately gross approximately $1 billion after its worldwide distribution. In fact, Jay Leno on The Tonight Show quipped that, “The movie has been so successful that they’re thinking about coming out with a book!” Of course the book is out and this is the book. The book tells us, describes for us, what Bible scholars call “the seven last words.” The seven last words refer to the last words that Jesus spoke on the cross. You might be thinking, “Well, didn’t He say more than seven words?” You would be right. In the Greek, Jesus spoke 41 words, and when they are translated into English we have 54 words. But, you see, the seven last words refer to the seven last statements or the seven last phrases of Christ from the cross. In your program, there is a bookmark. This bookmark, courtesy of Inklings Bookstore, has listed the seven last words of Christ from the cross. You can kind of follow along this morning as, very briefly, we’re going to take a look at each of the seven last words of Christ as we examine His death and resurrection.
We begin with the first word, which is the word of “mercy.” Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” This is the word of mercy. Of course, this word is incredible because Jesus had been scourged by the Romans. If you saw The Passion of the Christ, you know something of perhaps what the Roman scourging was like. Then he was made to carry His own cross along the path to Golgotha, the way of sorrows, and ultimately there on the mount, or the place of the skull, they drove nails through His hands and through His feet and He was lifted up in crucifixion. In the midst of His agony, He cried, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”
In Jewish theology, there are only two sins. There are two different types of sin in Jewish theology. First of all, there are sins committed in ignorance. That’s the first type of sin, sins committed in ignorance. The second type of sin consists of sins committed willfully with full awareness of their wrongfulness. In Jewish theology, only the first kind of sin could be forgiven. Only sins committed in ignorance could be forgiven. There was only mercy for those sins. You see, in Jewish theology the second type of sin could not be forgiven, not ever. There was no mercy for sins committed willfully with full knowledge of their wrongfulness. The second kind of sin, a person who committed that sin needed to make restitution, needed to make repairment, and always there needed to be atonement and that’s why we had the Jewish sacrificial system.
When Jesus cried out with this first word, the word of mercy—”Father, forgive them for they know not what they do”—this was a reference to the first kind of sin, sins committed in ignorance, for “they know not what they do.” Perhaps he was thinking of the Roman soldiers who surely didn’t understand, even those who were mocking Him. Perhaps He was thinking of Pilate or perhaps He was thinking of the Jewish Sanhedrin itself because none of them fully understood who He was or why He came. But you know, most of you know who He was and why He came, and you know that He went to that cross to take care of those second type of sins. He went to the cross to provide atonement for those sins that were committed willfully, those sins that were committed in full awareness of their wrongfulness. Jesus came to die for all sins and to provide atonement for all sins and of course that He might ultimately have mercy on all who believe in Him. That is the word of mercy.
The second word is the word of “salvation.” This was the word spoken to the penitent thief. ‘‘Today you will be with Me in paradise.” We don’t know much about the penitent thief. I mean, we don’t know his name. Throughout history many names have been suggested and surely they are all bogus. Of course, we don’t know whether the penitent thief was on His right hand or on His left hand, whether he was Republican or a Democrat. We don’t know. We do know that the penitent thief confessed his sin and acknowledged that he was deserving of crucifixion and that the cross was a due reward for his deeds. We also know that the penitent thief acknowledged the sinlessness of Jesus Christ, that He had done nothing wrong and that the penitent thief believed in life after death and a world beyond this world. The penitent thief believed that in that next world Christ would rule and reign. Therefore the penitent thief said, ‘‘Remember me when You come into Your kingdom.”
If we would find salvation, then we must do what the penitent thief did. We must confess our sin and we must embrace the reign of Christ. Make no mistake about this. If you would become a Christian truly, you must embrace the reign of Christ. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead and He is Lord. He is Lord of Lords and He is King of Kings. If you are genuinely Christian, if you have had an altar call or if you have asked Jesus to be your Savior or to save you, you’re still not saved unless you’ve embraced His reign. I wouldn’t be faithful to the Gospel—I’d be preaching a soft gospel, I wouldn’t be faithful to this book—if I told you anything else. A genuine Christian has embraced the reign of Christ. Of course you can do that today. You can do what the penitent thief did.
I’ve read recently many articles about canine euthanasia. Apparently this is a big problem in America now, canine euthanasia. There are just too many dogs, too many dogs in our country, a thought which has from time-to-time occurred to me. Apparently, there are more dogs in the United States of America than there are people who want to have a dog. Therefore dogs are brought to dog pounds and dogs are brought to animal shelters and dogs are brought to the Dumb Friends League. Many of these dogs have to be put to sleep because there are just more dogs than people who want them. Animal rights advocates would like to find a home for every dog, and when that’s not possible they want a dog to be put to sleep painlessly. And so we come to euthanasia.
The word euthanasia means “good death,” a compound Greek word from the word eu, which means “good,” and the word thanatos, which means “death.” Euthanasia. Good death. Perhaps for a dog a good death is simply a painless death. But, you see, for a human being a good death requires more than that. It’s not just a painless death that constitutes a good death for a human being. If you would have a good death, you must know you’re saved. The only good death is death where you know you have eternal life. That’s a good death. The penitent thief had a good death, not a painless death. He was crucified. He didn’t have a painless death, but he had a good death because he heard the word of salvation. “Today, you will be with Me in paradise.” If you embrace the reign of Christ, you too will hear that word.
The third word is the word of “care.” This is the word Christ spoke to Mary, His mother, and also to John, the beloved disciple, the friend of Jesus. Jesus spoke the word of care kind of bonding His mother and His friend. Jesus said to His mother with regard to John, “Behold, your son,” and Jesus said to John with regard to His mother, “Behold, your mother,” and so Jesus entrusted Mary and John to each other in His word of care. According to church tradition, from that moment on Mary went to live with John, and as long as she was on this earth she lived in his house.
Now, how incredible it is that Jesus, in the midst of His great suffering, in the midst of His agony, could have spoken this word of care and could have taken the time to focus on His mom and His friends? Even in death, even in agony, He cares. We should remember He cares about us. He cares about you and really it’s because He cares about you that He was there on the cross. It’s because He cares about us that He died for our sin and that He died in substitutionary atonement. It’s all about care. He cares about you so much that He invites you to come into His family and to become His brothers and sisters through faith, that His Father might become your Father and that you might become sons and daughters of God. He cares. As we conclude the service today, Evan is going to sing a song that refers to the great care that Jesus has for you.
The fourth word from the cross is the word of “abandonment.” I think of all the seven last words, this is the one most misunderstood: when Jesus said, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” The word of abandonment. To understand this word, we have to go back and look at the night before the cross, that Thursday night when Jesus was in the Upper Room with His disciples and He shared the Last Supper with them. Then after supper He went out with them to the Garden of Gethsemane. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus, with His disciples very nearby, knelt and He prayed a prayer that is oftentimes called the High Priestly Prayer. He prayed that prayer on His knees in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before He went to the cross. In that prayer, Jesus said, “Father, I have accomplished the things that Thou hast given Me to do. I have glorified Thy name on earth, having accomplished the things You have given Me to do. And now, Holy Father, glorify Thou Me in Thy own presence with the glory that I shared with You before the worlds were made.” What an amazing statement. None of us could pray a prayer like this. “The glory that I shared with You before the worlds were made.”
In that prayer, Jesus goes on to speak of the love that He shared with His Father before the foundation of the earth. In that prayer, Jesus goes on to speak of eternal oneness with the Father. Of course this is a great mystery and it’s affirmed all through the Bible, both the Old and the New Testament, that Jesus is somehow eternally One with the Father. That’s why, when the disciples came to Jesus and they said, “Show us the Father and we’ll be satisfied,” Jesus said, “Have you been with Me so long and yet you do not know Me? How can you say, ‘Show us the Father?’ He who has seen Me has seen the Father. Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in Me?” Jesus said, “I and the Father are One.” Eternal oneness.
Now you come to the moment on the cross (and there came a moment in time on that cross, and the Bible is very clear on this) when the sin of the world was vested on the Son of God. “Though He knew no sin, He was made to take on sin for us” the Bible says. The sin of the world was vested upon Him, and all the sin of the world—all the sin that you’ve ever committed, all the sin I’ve ever committed, all the sin I will ever commit, all the sin you’ll ever commit, all the sin ever committed by people through all the millennia (good people, bad people, all people)—was vested on Jesus in a moment in time as He was on that cross that He might die for the sin of the world. As that sin was vested on Him, there came a moment when, for the first time in eternity, He was separated from the Father. In some sense, their intimacy was broken because sin separates us from God. Sin brings separation from God. The Bible is clear. Somehow, in some sense, in that moment on the cross He experienced the separation that sin brings as the sin of the world was vested upon Him and that intimacy that He had had for all eternity was somehow, for some period of time on the cross, broken. He cried out, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?”—“My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” It was the most profound theological moment in all of the Bible. And that’s how much He loves us, that He was willing to go through that spiritual pain for us.
You’ve seen the movie The Passion. You know His physical pain. But I honestly believe that physical pain, great as it was, was nothing compared to the spiritual pain He endured. He knew and foreknew what He would endure. That’s why He cried out in Gethsemane. He knew the sin of the world would be vested upon Him and He would die in substitutionary atonement and that eternal oneness in some sense would experience separation on the cross. “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” The word of abandonment.
The fifth word is the word of “distress.” This is where Christ cried out, “I thirst.” There’s no way that any of us assembled here can understand the distress that Christ experienced on the cross or even the thirst that He experienced. This isn’t the thirst that we feel when we haven’t had our 8 to 12 glasses of water a day. Jesus had experienced Roman scourging and perhaps it took place in the way that it was portrayed in the movie The Passion of the Christ. Perhaps He was scourged on both the front and the back. We do not know, but we do know this: many people did not survive Roman scourging. We have historical records. Many people simply did not survive Roman scourging, and we have records of people who were sentenced to crucifixion who were scourged first and never crucified because they died in the scourging. I can promise you, Jesus was half dead before He ever began to walk the Via Dolorosa. He was half dead when He came out of that Roman scourging and He was then made to carry the patibulum, the crossbar of the cross which weighed approximately 110 pounds. He had to carry it up that hill from the palace to the place of the skull—the place of crucifixion, Golgotha—and that was a distance of approximately 350 yards along the Via Dolorosa, 6-1/2 football fields. He could have done that were He not half dead.
When He arrived on the crown of the hill, the place of crucifixion, His hands and His feet were nailed to the cross and He was lifted up in agony. There are few deaths as painful as crucifixion or more cruel. It had been created by the Persians. They invented crucifixion. Alexander the Great brought crucifixion back to the Greek world and the Romans adapted it from the Greeks, but they perfected it. In crucifixion a person experiences asphyxiation and they cannot breathe. They experience systematic dehydration, loss of blood, and heart failure. It’s all part of the agony. When He cried out, “I thirst,” the thirst He was feeling was systematic and unknown to us, the agony that He went through because He loves and cares so much about humanity, so much for us.
It’s kind of ironic when you look at the world today and you see people debating the deity of Christ. You read books like Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code—a book which historically is bogus—attacking the deity of Christ with false historical information. It’s well written and of course the deity of Christ has always been debated through the centuries and millennia, but you should know that it’s always been affirmed. I mean, from the 1st century, the deity and the divinity of Christ has been affirmed. That’s why you find the books of the New Testament and even the Old affirming the deity of Christ, and you really need to know that for the 1st century of the Church, the real question had to do with His humanity. The question was not was He divine, but was He really human?
You’ve heard of Gnosticism, which was a 2nd-century cult that arose and created the Gnostic gospels which were written a hundred years after the biblical gospels. The Gnostic gospels never attacked the deity of Christ. They attacked the humanity of Christ. They just couldn’t believe that this man really could have been human. Of course, people in the 1st century knew of His miracles, how He had calmed the sea, how He had cured the lepers, the blind could see, the deaf could hear, He raised the dead, and they thought, “How could He be human?” but He was human. He was God incarnate in the flesh and He truly took our nature upon Himself and He was fully God and fully man and we see His humanity on the cross as He went through suffering beyond what most humans will ever endure. By God’s grace, it is beyond what you’ll ever endure. So we have the word of ‘‘distress,’’ ‘‘I thirst.”
The sixth word is the word of “triumph.” The word triumph is “It is finished.” Of course, it doesn’t sound much like triumph. It sounds a little more like defeat. “It is finished.” That’s what the Nuggets would have said in their locker room last night had they lost to Portland. That’s what the losing team late in the year always says, “It’s finished.” It sounds like defeat but, you see, the Greek word here is tetalestai. This word is wrongly rendered, “It is finished.” The word tetalestai means, “It is accomplished.” That’s what the Greek word means, “it is accomplished.”
What had Christ accomplished on the cross? We can understand what He accomplished when we understand the word tetalestai was used in the context of debt in the ancient world. When a debt was paid, the parchment of debt was stamped with this word, tetalestai, “paid in full.” That’s what Jesus had accomplished on the cross. He paid the debt. He paid your debt. He paid my debt. He paid all the debt in the world. He paid the penalty for sin.
I have this week’s issue of Time magazine in my hand. Once again, Christ is on the cover of Time, and that’s always scary. The title is, “Why Did Jesus Have To Die?” You read the article and you can tell they don’t know the answer. I mean, they suggest a variety of possibilities, some of which are biblically true, but, you see, the Bible is clear. Jesus had to die to pay the debt, that it might be accomplished to pay your sin and my sin, to atone. That’s why He had to die. Of course, you can’t separate the cross and the empty tomb, because on the cross Jesus triumphed over sin, and in the empty tomb Christ triumphed over death in the resurrection. These two are joined because the Bible says, “The penalty for sin is death,” and Jesus triumphed over both. He triumphed over both. If you would triumph, if you would enter into His triumph, if you would have victory over sin and victory over death, then you must embrace Jesus as Savior and King. You must embrace His reign.
There’s a final word from the cross—the last word, the seventh word. This is the word “reunion.” “Father, into Thy hands I commit My Spirit.” This is sometimes called the word of “commitment,” and of course it is a word of reunion because Jesus, having been sent forth from the Father, was now returning to the Father. But it was a word of commitment because He committed His soul, His Spirit, to the Father.
Through the years…I’ve been in ministry for 30 years, a little over 30 years, and in these 30 years I’ve done a lot of funeral services. I’ve done a lot of memorial services and many times, in conjunction with a memorial service, there’s a committal service. A committal service takes place at the cemetery, at the gravesite. It’s there at the committal service where the pastor is expected to commit the body to the earth and the soul and spirit into heaven. And so at a committal service, the pastor says, “I commit this body to the earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes,” and then the pastor commits the soul and the spirit into heaven and into the presence of God.
I’ve often thought, “What a crazy thing! What a crazy thing for pastors to do.” I don’t have the power to commit a soul or spirit into heaven. I don’t have the power to commit a soul or spirit to God. I can commit a body to the earth, dust to dust, but I don’t have the power to commit a soul to heaven. You see, if your soul, if your spirit is going to be committed to Christ, you must make that commitment. I can’t make that commitment for you and you can’t make that commitment for me. You can commit your soul and spirit to Jesus Christ and to the Father. Nobody can do it for you, so I want you to understand and God wants us to understand as we conclude Easter Services this year that salvation comes by faith and the word faith, the Greek word pisteuo, means “commitment.” It doesn’t mean intellectual assent. Faith means commitment. You must commit your body, soul, and spirit to Christ if you believe in Christ. That’s what faith means. It’s a word of action and implies relinquishment, surrender, commitment, and consecration. That’s the meaning of pisteuo.
So, who is a Christian? A Christian is someone who has made that commitment, who has committed their body, soul, and spirit to Jesus Christ in His service. Do you want to go to heaven? I think people misunderstand heaven. A lot of people in the world think, “Well, a lot of people in the world think heaven is just going to be a place with… You know, I can still live for myself but I’ll have better toys. That’s how a lot of people seem to view heaven. I can promise you, most people don’t want to go to heaven because they would be miserable there. If they knew what it was like, they wouldn’t want to go there because heaven is a place where people are committed body, soul, and spirit to Jesus Christ. They worship and serve Him forever. If you don’t want to do it on earth, you’re not going to want to do it in heaven.
So, you see, it’s all about commitment and genuine Christians have made that commitment. They’ve decided they want to live for Him. How about you? This is no false gospel, but an invitation. I know the Holy Spirit of God tugs on the hearts of people wherever the gospel is preached. No matter how inadequately it’s presented, the Holy Spirit tugs on the hearts of people. Embrace the reign of Christ. Let’s close with a word of prayer.